NUMBERS
“Extremely productive authors”
researchers published 60 or more articles per year according to an analysis of the Scopus database for the period from 2020 to 2022 that was published in December 2023 as a preprint on Biorxiv. These “extremely productive authors” were therefore publishing a new article every six days. And their number is rising. This calculation actually excludes physics because the number in that particular field is roughly four times higher still. These high figures suggest that lenient criteria are being applied when assigning authorship, or even that so-called ‘gift authorship’ is still common.